So rather than replace human contact, customer support software should be used to make interactions more human and facilitate mass-personalization.

How?

Let’s talk about software

Trying to nail and scale customer success without software is like trying to put together an Ikea bed without all the pieces. It might stand shakily upright for a while, but at some point, it’s going to collapse in the middle of the night.

You can have eons of data at your fingertips, but it’s useless without the tools to spark actionable insights.

Sounless your customer service team = the grand sum of one staff member + one email account (and trust me, I’ve been there), you’re going to need some support software.

But, you guessed it, there are about a billion options vying for your business. And they all claim to be the best.

There’s a lot to consider before taking the leap.

So, how to judge software options?

Start by evaluating the needs of your business and your customer.

Talk to members of your team across the ranks to see what would make their lives easier: you can even put together an evaluation panel of junior and senior members of staff to give you the most coherent overview.

Then it’s time to knuckle down with a red bull and do some market research; read reviews, ask around your network, colleagues, friends for some personal recommendations and pull together a shortlist.

You can knock a few candidates off the list just by browsing their website and looking at demos, without having to sign up.

Consider things like customer experience, integrations, onboarding assistance, user interface, platform stability and general sentiments of the company within your industry.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to two or three — sign up. Any SaaS company that backs itself will offer a free trial (big red flag if it doesn’t).

Then you can play around with it, ask your staff members to test it out and choose a winner. Simple (ish).

Now, let’s take a look at the various options out there:

Help customers help themselves with help desk software

Help desk software is the digital meeting place of all your customer grievances. Basically, it centralizes issues so you can solve them all a) in one place and b) much more efficiently.

Get chatty with customer messaging software

64% of consumers expect businesses to be able to interact with them in real time, and 44% consider having a live chat the most important feature when shopping online.

You can set up a live chat in minutes using a tool like Intercom or Drift, or set up a bot on a pre-existing platform such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord or Telegram.

Integrate, integrate, integrate

If you’re serious about your data, you might want to consider bringing in Customer Success Management software (CSM) for the ultimate overview.

CSM is a relatively recent development within the SaaS industry. It’s intended to help companies improve retention rate by giving a cohesive overview into every nook and cranny of their customer data. It allows you to:

track customer usage and adoption, which in turn lets you identify who’s about to churn before they do;

set up alerts or personalized responses; seek out customers that need a little extra TLC;

For the less data-obsessed amongst us (like myself), there’s also Zapier, a service that allows you to create automated workflows between multiple apps. It’s super-simple and the perfect tool to pull everything together with.

Build trust with the right support channels

Fuelled by the desire of providing amazing customer support, it can be tempting to over-promise and say “we’ll be available on every channel, every day, all the time.”

But with the limited resources of a startup, it’s often impossible to make this support consistent. That’s why it’s better to nail support over a couple of channels than to attempt to tackle them all, do an average job and eventually have to close some of them down.

The role of AI in customer success

Way back in 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 85% of customer relationships would be managed without human intervention. That’s not quite the reality — but it’s not far off.

AI is giving machines the ability to interact with humans on a level that was previously only imaginable in sci-fi movies, powering every interaction we have and raising customer expectations to a whole new level.

Today, 38% of companies use AI and machine learning, and it’s predicted to reach 62% by the end of this year.

But technology is only part of the puzzle; the magic happens when the customer success agent and the software combine come together in perfect harmony.

When software succeeds in solving common, simple problems, it gives us room to commit to unusual, complex problems that require empathy, a deep understanding of nuanced situations, and intuition — all traits that humans possess and machines don’t.

We need to use technology to strengthen the human touch; not to overpower it.

By Major Sunil Shetty (SM) Retd
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